mory--let it be so. Was he to
be cut off from this sudden joy of friendship with one of his blood
and race, he whose soul was perishing with drought, though, until this
moment, he had been too proud to own it to himself?

But when he entered Dom Diego's lodging and saw the unexpected,
forgotten Ianthe--Ianthe grown from that sweet child to matchless
grace of early womanhood; Ianthe with her dark smiling eyes and her
caressing voice and her gentle movements--then this resolution of
passive silence was exchanged for a determination to fight desperately
against discovery. In the glow of his soul, in the stir of youth and
spring in his veins, in the melting rapture of his mood, that first
sight of a beautiful girl's face bent smilingly to greet her father's
guest had sufficed to set his heart aflame with a new emotion, sweet,
riotous, sacred. What a merry supper-party was that; each dish eaten
with the sauce of joyous memories! How gaily he rallied Ianthe on her
childish ways and sayings! Of course, she remembered him, she said,
and the toys and flowers, and told how comically he had puckered his
brow in argumentation with her father. Yes, he had the same funny
lines still, and once she touched his forehead lightly for an instant
with her slender fingers in facetious demonstration, and he trembled
in painful rapture. And she played on her lute, too, on the lute he
had given her of old, those slender fingers making ravishing music on
the many-stringed instrument, though her pose as she played was more
witching still. What a beautiful glimpse of white shoulders and dainty
lace her straight-cut black bodice permitted!

He left the house drunk, exalted, and as the cold night air smote the
forehead she had touched he was thrilled with fiery energy. He was
young still, thank God, though fifteen years had been eaten out of
his life, and he had thought himself as old and gray as the marshes.
He was young still, he told himself fiercely, defiantly. At home his
note-book lay open, as usual, on his desk, like a friend waiting to
hear what thoughts had come to him in his lonely walk. How far off and
alien seemed this cold confidant now, how irrelevant, and yet, when
his eye glanced curiously at his last recorded sentence, how relevant!
"All evils come from not following Right Reason and the Law of
Nature." How true! How true! He had followed neither Right Reason nor
the Law of Nature.

X

In the morning, when the cold, pitiless